You know what an octopus is, the eight arms, suckers, and sack-like body are almost as familiar to people as cats or dogs.   If you're reading this, you also have enough science to know that soft tissue fossils are very rare because usually only hard objects can survive the somewhat lottery-winning odds of fossilizing at all.
 
The body of an octopus is composed almost entirely of muscle and skin, and when an octopus dies, it quickly decays and liquefies into a slimy blob. After just a few days there will be nothing left at all.

But people do win the lottery and some new finds of 95 million year old fossils reveal much earlier origins of modern octopuses than previously thought - prior to this, only a single fossil species was known, and from fewer specimens than octopuses have legs.

So when did octopuses acquire their characteristic body plan?   We are a little closer to finding out.

Palaeontologists have just identified three new species of fossil octopus discovered in Cretaceous rocks in Lebanon. The five specimens, described in the latest issue of the journal Palaeontology, are 95 million years old but, astonishingly, preserve the octopuses' eight arms with traces of muscles and those characteristic rows of suckers.

Even traces of the ink and internal gills are present in some specimens. "These are sensational fossils, extraordinarily well preserved," says Dirk Fuchs of the Freie University Berlin, lead author of the report. But what surprised the scientists most was how similar the specimens are to modern octopus: "These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.  This provides important evolutionary information.

"The more primitive relatives of octopuses had fleshy fins along their bodies. The new fossils are so well preserved that they show, like living octopus, that they didn't have these structures."

This pushes back the origins of modern octopus by tens of millions of years and, while this is scientifically significant, perhaps the most remarkable thing about these fossils is that they exist at all.